Starting in early June, Kirkus is going to publish our best bets for the new fiction and nonfiction that will delight you this summer. But summer isn’t just for reading new books that have the most buzz; hot days give us time to waft in and out of the books we know we’re supposed to have read but never got around to. During this magazine’s 80-year history, our critics have had an enviable track record of knowing which books would become classics when those books were first published. So before we divulge 2013’s hot summer reading titles, this week we give you 10 classics to catch up on.

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